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Liana Sayer: Still no gender equality in housework

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Liana Sayer: Still no gender equality in housework

With and without children, women still spend more time on domestic chores than men

MPRC faculty associate Liana Sayer finds that the discrepancy between men’s and women’s time spent on housework has been decreasing since the 1960s. The amount of time women spend on housework has dropped as women spend more time working outside the home, and the amount of housework done by men has increased. But men would still need to increase the amount of time spent on housework by 70% in order to match women.

Interestingly, Sayer found that the discrepancy between men’s and women’s housework even applies to single people without children in the picture. "In 2012 single women with no children reported doing almost twice as much cooking, cleaning, and laundry as single men with no children," she writes. “Some of the differences in men’s and women’s household activities may not stem from unfair interpersonal power dynamics but from entrenched individual and cultural beliefs about ‘essential’ qualities of being a woman versus being a man.” But some of the difference may come from gender inequalities in earnings. Women may be doing more of their domestic chores themselves instead of eating out or using drycleaners because their wages still average20% lower than men’s.